“You mean a witch like Rem Murau?”
“Oh no. Worse. Much worse.”
Kanna raised an eyebrow, unsure if this was all another elaborate metaphor. She stumbled out of the lift to follow Lila into the chamber, her earlier confidence unraveling, the tight lump in her throat returning twofold. She did not have the energy to be angry with herself for falling back into her usually resistant state, but the sights and sounds of the spreading hall—which wound around a corner before disappearing—had put her on edge.
Glowing, flickering faces, carved into the stone and akin to plaster death masks, lined the walls in small alcoves, serving as torches that lit the path. They emitted a low electric whine as Lila led her past them, but that small sound was soon drowned out by voices that boomed from the walls. Kanna jumped, thinking that it had been the masks who had spoken; instead, she realized that some indistinct echo had traveled through the framework. It happened again: a pounding, a screaming. She could not make out the words because they buzzed from somewhere far away.
“How close are we to Goda?” She squinted at the coiled designs that etched the walls, looking for windows, looking for doors, looking for some kind of clue of where she was—but she only recognized a few glyphs of Old Middlelander between the curtains that vibrated with another round of pained voices. “Does this ‘sorceress’ torture people in here or something?”
“If you’re asking about the screaming, that’s coming from outside. We’re in the outermost hall that wraps around the fourth level of the temple, which is the path to the Heart Chamber—the room with the altar where Goda was last seen—but this is also the entrance floor, so we’re back to the top of the hill where we first stopped. The closer we get to the entrance, the more we will hear the mourners making their demands, I’m sure.”
“Well, if this temple belongs to a powerful witch, why doesn’t she expel them from her home?”
Lila’s laugh was mirthless. “Believe me, you’re not the only one asking that question. If she had wanted to stop this riot, she could have. But she hasn’t. Even with the High Minister begging and pleading with her to declare Rem dead or alive, she has chosen silence and has not evacuated the temple.”
Kanna glanced up at the patchwork heavens as they passed beneath an archway that had been molded to look like a woman with open arms.
“The Mother?” she asked.
“Yes. The High Priestess. In all but name, she is queen of the Middlelanders, the living incarnation of the Goddess herself. Because of the shrine buried deep in this mount, she is believed to have the power to summon and cast out serpents. She does not meddle in human affairs very much, but when she does interfere, she can be quite unpredictable, so watch out. I am telling you all this because she is currently locked in the Heart Chamber, in the exact room where Goda is right now, and it is better for you to be prepared for what you will find in there.”
“You mean the leader of this whole insane religion is just sitting in that room watching and doing nothing while the world goes to hell?”
“That appears to be the case, yes. Sadly, this is just her way. She does not often get her hands dirty in such affairs—she is a priestess after all, and you already know how that goes—though it does seem that she has abandoned her duty to Rem on purpose. We can only speculate as to why. Maybe she knows something that we mere mortals don’t. The High Priestess can see and hear and witness all kinds of things that would escape us within these walls. In fact, she is probably listening to this conversation right now.”
Kanna jerked again, taken off guard. She examined the high ceiling, the rows of archways and alcoves, half-expecting to see a pair of gigantic eyes following her movement down the path. Instead, she noticed the dozens of animalistic sculptures tucked into niches high on the walls, and how the draperies had slowly turned from an empty black, to a dark red, to a deep orange, and, in the distance as the corner turned yet again, to a jade green that contrasted sharply with the blood-colored carpet that flowed like a thin river beneath her feet.
The cries from outside flowed to her, too, the ceilings amplifying every booming shout, every collective thrust against some entrance that she could not see, where it had all become a rhythmic pulse.
“Fine. I don’t care. Where do I need to go?” Kanna kept her eyes trained on the path, following Lila into this purgatory in spite of her trepidation, wary of the volume of her voice so as to not attract the sorceress. “How do I get into that chamber? I’m not so naive anymore as to think it will be easy. Everything that the Middlelanders build is a goddamn trap, a pointlessly complicated labyrinth with a trigger around every stupid corner. Are there going to be flying spears and false floors waiting for me?”
“Not exactly, but there will be guards outside the main doors. In theory, they should be expecting to let us in, since the vice minister telegraphed them about our planned solution ahead of time, but the power has been dropping, and we’re not sure if the message made it through. Without the engineer, they will certainly be skeptical, especially once they see what you look like.”
“What I…look like?”
“A small, mannish foreigner waltzing right into the most delicate crisis the temple has ever seen? My word alone won’t convince them to allow it. They barely trust me as it is because of my Outerlander heritage; they’re going to insist on waiting for a good signal from the high minister, which we don’t have time for, especially with the power already faltering.”
“Then what do we do?” Slowly, Kanna unclenched her hand, the increasingly colorful edges of the path receding as she stared into her palm where the key warmly stuck to her sweating skin. “Unless we’re meant to pass through solid walls in here?”
“No, we’re not. But someone like you doesn’t need to.”
Much to Kanna’s irritation, Lila did not elaborate when Kanna threw her a questioning glance. Instead, the woman gestured to where the hall turned on itself, as if the answer would appear around the next corner—but nothing appeared except for more of the same bewildering corridor. The more they wound around the building, the more Kanna realized that the hall was a ramp, slowly rising like a staircase, but far more subtle, gradual.
The voices grew louder, becoming a roar the further they walked. The pounding had turned into battering that shook the walls and the floor. Just as it had seemed to reach a crescendo and Kanna covered her ears with her hands to keep the bones in her head from vibrating, they found the last archway:
It was styled like a massive swan, wings spread, holding up the ceiling on its shoulders as if it were holding up the sky, the stars and planets etched just above the lights that had begun to flicker more and more. On the wall’s frame just behind it, two eggs, colored like the moon, were perched on a pair of small trumpet-shaped pedestals that led into veiny glass tubes flowing into the swan’s wings. The feathers, made of carved glass with many colors, warped the light and sent rays shimmering in a thousand directions while the bird rattled with the shuddering walls.
“Goddess almighty, that is the ugliest thing I have ever seen in my life!” Kanna cried after she took one look at it. “Lila, where on Earth have you taken me? Let’s get out of here and find Goda. I can’t stand this place anymore.”
Lila stopped right before the threshold of the arch, which was blocked by a tall set of black doors that seemed to be holding in whatever loud commotion was coming from the other side. Eager to move on, Kanna reached towards the door handles, but Lila grasped her hand before her fingers even brushed iron.
“Hold it. Don’t give yourself away. You don’t want to join the chaos on the other side, believe me.”
Kanna snapped back, giving Lila an open glare. “What’s in there, then?”
“Past this threshold, you’ll find the doors to the Heart Chamber on the left and the main entrance to the temple on the right. The space in between is the antechamber, where there is simply no way for us to slip through without having to answer lots of questions. Every guard in the temple surely must have swarmed to this failure point, since this is where the crowd is pushing against the front doors—but we have an advantage.” Lila yanked her to one of the corners of the archway, and before Kanna could complain, the woman grasped the back of her head and tipped it up towards the short stretch of wall just above the painted swan, between the two veiny eggs. “You see that?”
Kanna squinted in the waning light, finding the vague outline of an oval scored into the wood, about the height and width of an arms-length. “What is it?”
“It’s a hatch. The Maharan religion does not have male clergy in the strict sense, but there are male temple workers and monks. The problem is that the Heart Chamber is one of the most sacred places in the entire religion—second only to a sealed altar room at Samma Valley Monastery—but male religious workers may need to witness ceremonies in there from time to time.”
“All right. So?”
“So they are men! Men cannot set foot in the Heart Chamber! It is especially inconvenient if a priestess needs to bring a manservant, so they get around this issue by using that hatch. It leads to a crawl space that allows the men to reach a catwalk inside, which is perched just above the seating area that the priestesses use. That way, their mistresses can keep an eye on them without having them touch anything, and the men can passively watch the rituals through small viewing ports. It is a bit of a squeeze. The door is built discreetly and purposefully small to fit the frame of a Middlelander man, but as your people are built so efficiently, you will be able to slip in nicely, I hope.”
“You hope?”
“There is only one way to know for sure.” Lila patted the side of the archway that bordered the threshold, and it was then that Kanna noticed the grooves in the plaster for the first time. The hand-sized notches lined the curve of the arch all the way to the top, like the rungs of a ladder, like the bones of a spine. They twisted around the side of the threshold, flowing up to a shallow ledge and ultimately ending in a wooden knob rising out of the swan’s back like the horn of a saddle.
“You have to be joking,” Kanna said, stupefied. “There must be another way.”
“These days, when the men come, the guards bring an actual ladder and carry them up there, since more than one monk has had a nasty fall over the years. It’s a good thing the carpet is red. Sadly, we don’t have time for these luxuries, and you’ll have to take the traditional way.” The woman knelt down. “Come on, I’ll help you up. It’s easier than it looks.”
“Oh, you’ve done it yourself?”
“No, but it looks impossible, so technically it’s easier than it looks.”
Kanna’s wry glance was not lingering, since she did not have time to waste. Giving the key in her hand a final squeeze of resignation and dropping it into her pocket, she allowed Lila to boost her up the first few rungs. The woman watched her closely as she climbed—so closely that Kanna felt scrutinized and wondered if Lila was expecting her already to fall. She found that the inside of the handholds had been roughened with tar, though, and that the plaster itself had grooves shaped into the heads of strange beasts, so that as long as she kept her feet pressed hard to either side of the arch, the climb was not as effortful as she had first thought.
Halfway up the arch, she gritted her teeth, bracing herself when the walls shook yet again and she nearly lost her footing. “Lila!” she cried, heart pounding, though she managed to keep hanging, her foot stamped onto the face of a viper carved into the arch frame, its wooden fangs digging into her sole.
“What is it, girl?”
The near-miss had knocked her out of her single-minded focus. For the first time, she allowed herself to catch her breath. “What…what am I doing here?” The eyes of a falcon stared out from the etched plaster in front of her, and it unnerved her, so once again she met the gaze of her benefactor—or her manipulator—without hiding her helplessness anymore.
But the woman, who was not her master, only shrugged. “Oh, I don’t know.” The cryptic look on her face had returned, the one that seemed to say that she knew something Kanna could never guess. “Do you want me to help you down?”
“No!”
“All right. Climb, then. If you wait too long, you’ll get tired and fall, and I’m not strong enough to catch you. I’m no giant.”
Kanna groaned and reached for the next hold, but she hesitated, her attention still split in a dozen directions. “Lila!”
“What is it, my dear?”
“Once I’m in there—in the chamber, I mean…what do I even do?” She had not thought that far yet. She had been so narrow in her vision, and she was so close to the end, that now she could not fathom what was next. The hundreds of anxious thoughts, and the thousands of questions that had seemed so unimportant before rose again to the surface. It made her muscles lock with uncertainty.
Lila’s own face, however, looked more certain than before. “When you go through the hatch, follow the passage, but don’t get on the bridge to the catwalk at the end. Instead, climb down into the priestess’s viewing area, and you should be able to get into the main space of the chamber from there.”
“Thank you, but that’s not what I meant.”
“I know.”
“How do I do it, Lila?” Kanna pressed her forehead to the plaster, her shoulders already aching as the archway shook yet again. “How do I get someone who absolutely hates herself to even want to be rescued, assuming we can find a way out? Is it even going to be worth it? What if nothing I do works?”
“Nothing you do will work, Kanna.”
Lila’s smile was serene when another strike rang through the walls, this time a blow strong enough to knock glass feathers from the swan’s wings, which fell to the ground and shattered.
“You see it now, don’t you? Yes, you see it: All your works are futile. All of them. Love is lost on her; it is wasted; it slides right off like water from a swan’s back, because she hates herself. And you cannot make her love herself. She sought to dissolve her identity, and it is true that transcending the limited self is the path to freedom, the price you pay, bit by bit, to let go of every impurity, until you are light as a feather and can fly up to God—but her way is not the way. Her intentions are not genuine. She wants to rid herself of herself, to fight herself, to beat herself to death, not because she loves God, but because she hates herself. She hates herself more than she loves anything. This is the ultimate evil, the unforgivable sin, the thing which the Goddess finds most detestable of all. What Goda has been seeking all this time is not enlightenment—it is self-annihilation.”
Kanna screwed her eyes shut and held onto the arch for her life, though the tension of her clinging only made her arms shake more as the walls shuddered with her.
“She is suicidal, Kanna. She has been for nine years. Nothing you do will change that. She has an inner sickness that cannot be healed by anyone. Even Flower will not heal it.”
Kanna fought back the tears, and when she opened her eyes, the faces of the beasts on the archway grew blurred, transforming into swirling patterns. She turned her gaze instead up to the rattling swan who had mocked her. “Then what do you want from me? Why am I even here?”
Lila did not answer; instead, she asked again, “Do you want me to help you down?”
The walls creaked and shook like a pitching vessel—but Kanna dug her nails in. “No.”
“Climb, then. There is nothing left for you to do except climb. Everything you want is in that chamber, and no plan you make out here will do you any good in there, trust me. You will have to do this on faith and faith alone. Stop looking to anyone else for reassurance; I won’t give it to you.”
With nothing left, with that last ounce of her expectation evaporated, Kanna climbed up towards Hell, because it was the only thing she had ever wanted. When she reached the ledge at the top of the threshold—which was barely as wide as the seat of a bench—she was able to lift herself up and finally rest her pulsing arms. The break was short-lived, however; the walls were buzzing with conflict, and because she was afraid that she would lose momentum, she dragged herself along the narrow shelf until she could grasp the horn on the back of the swan. She balanced herself atop the bird, pressing her hand against the spot on the wall that was marked into the wood.
The hatch flipped open easily, lighter and thinner than she had expected. It revealed almost nothing, though, only darkness peppered with rays of flashing light from the passageway inside. She crouched and stepped in, but found that she had to lower herself to her hands and knees to allow her head to clear the top. One last time, she gazed out at the ornate hallway, past the lights that flickered and waned, the perspective allowing her to see the full brilliance of the many masks, which were less eerie from above.
At the center of it all, Lila stood quietly below, smile unchanged.
“I don’t know if I’ll see you again,” Kanna told her. “I still don’t know what to think of you—you’re the most brazen and open hypocrite I’ve ever met—and I still don’t know why you helped me, but I never would have made it here without you, so thank you.”
“No worries. It’s my job to help—and to be a hypocrite.”
For a brief moment, Kanna was able to look at her face without judgment, to notice how something gleamed in the eyes, something that shined beyond the mask.
“But one more thing,” the woman added. “Be sure to heed my warning about The Mother, as she is certainly lurking somewhere in that chamber.”
“What warning?”
“If she appears, do not speak to her, do not approach her, absolutely do not stare at her face. Doing so can be seen as an invitation for her to unravel your serpents, as she does this to her own children by habit. However, she will not force herself on a heathen unless invited. Pretend that she doesn’t exist and she will respect your atheism.”
Not knowing what any of this meant, Kanna nonetheless thanked her one last time, then retreated into the passage. The hatch snapped closed behind her. She crawled through the dark, towards the dim opening at the end of the narrow tube, which was the main source of light. Beside her, small slits—facing whatever antechamber Lila had forbidden her—revealed the glow of torches and allowed the booming racket from the other side to reach her. Unperturbed, she did not stop crawling, but she did peer through the view-ports as she passed.
It was chaos.
Uniformed women sprinted around the room, dozens of them, the light weak and flickering, but casting shadows everywhere. On the right, huge doors of thick wood covered a massive threshold, and it was barred with chains and planks from top to bottom, with countless women pressed up against them, leaning their weight hard into the creaking frame. To the left, stood another set of doors, equally massive, but strangely untouched, and colored with an elaborate swirl of deep purple and green, the carvings upon it too complex for the waning light to do it justice. Near that entrance, a half-dozen soldiers crouched at an open control box on the wall where one of the women pressed switches in a mindless rhythm, in a wild panic.
Suddenly, the floor shook beneath Kanna as the doors of the threshold below her scraped open.
“Hadd?” The soldier at the control box snapped around, the sheen of sweat on her face pulsing with the living and dying light. “Thank goodness, finally! What took you so long? The Vice Minister telegraphed us over an hour ago, but the signal is dead now! It looks like the power is going out.”
When Lila appeared in the room below, her breath was steady, perfect, too contrasted with the rest of the chamber’s energy. It even sounded like she had closed the door quietly behind her. “There was an incident downstairs and I need you to send guards to the machine room immediately.”
“What? We don’t have the people for that! We have reinforcements now, but they’re outside trying to keep back the crowd. There’s no telling how long these doors will hold if the rioters break through the line again. Where is Engineer Mah? They told us she was coming with Brahm’s cuff key and a heathen mercenary who can…do what is necessary. We can’t wait much longer for this.”
“I’m afraid that we were separated from Engineer Mah—but about the rest, don’t worry; we’ve already deployed the heathen who will slay Goda Brahm. The more urgent issue is on the ground floor: We need to send soldiers down to the pits of this temple right now or we could face a workers’ rebellion, as Goda brahm has unchained them, so they are running amok.”
“She did what?”
Kanna blinked, startled, but she reminded herself not to take Lila’s games so seriously. Having seen quite enough, she turned away, training her eyes on the end of the tube where she could spot the beginnings of the perch that Lila had mentioned, and the warm light of a very different chamber. The voices once again merged together as another strike rattled the building, and Kanna left it all behind.
When she reached the ledge of the catwalk, she remembered again what the woman had told her, and instead of proceeding, she looked down to find a loft filled with pews facing a closed set of dark curtains that appeared to cover an opening with thin rays leaking through. There was barely any other light, only a small electric torch illuminating what seemed like an exit on the other end of the room. There was no ladder, either, no path to get down from the start of the catwalk and into the chamber below—but it was not that far of a jump, Kanna thought. She turned around and, with a grunt, let herself slide down until she was hanging by her fingers. She dropped into the room.
Kanna hit a bench and rolled onto the floor, but was otherwise unscathed. The room rumbled from another blow against the walls outside, though it felt distant, more insulated. There was an odd quiet otherwise. The scent of incense overwhelmed her, made her cough as she ambled down the row between the pews. On a mantelpiece behind the last seats, a small wooden goddess smiled at her as she passed. She followed the light of the one torch into the opening of a passageway, since it was the only way out.
The dread had returned—the heaviness in her legs, the uncertainty—but she persevered and let it pass through her like any other storm, entering the small corridor that descended like a ramp and which was lit only by the light coming from its end. The sudden sight of a dozen women surrounding her made her start, until she realized that the walls were lined with mirrors. Kanna pressed a hand to the glass. She had not seen her own face so clearly in a long time, and as she looked into her own eyes, she found that she did not recognize herself anymore. Her face was clean, her eyes dark with pupils spread wide open. Serpents gathered behind her head, rearing up, casting shadows and colors. She ignored them and moved on until she reached the end.
Three steps separated her from the main space and, clenching her jaw, fighting the dread that slowed her, she looked hard at her feet as she descended them. The stone was cold when she hit the temple floor.
Finally, she looked up.
In the depths of the room, surrounded by firelight from all angles, a tall woman on a throne regarded her, amber eyes unblinking from her place on a high platform overlooking a deep pool of steaming water. Kanna could see nothing else except those piercing eyes, as the face was covered in a veil and the body was otherwise draped from head to toe—but after meeting that gaze for an eternal moment, she realized that the eyes were made of glass.
It was a huge statue of the Goddess, set upon an altar, decorated with flowing robes of fine silk, the altar steps leading down to the table upon which a lifeless Rem Murau lay, which overlooked the swirling waters. Kanna could not stop her own shudder when she noticed the woman’s face, when she saw the bright red smears, the oozing blood that painted her mouth and cheek and neck, that dribbled down to the floor and grew a small puddle on the ground.
At the other end of the pool, draped over its edge, face pressed to the stone and holding a bloody dagger whose tip colored the whirlpool in a weak pink, lay what was left of Goda Brahm.
Kanna stiffened with shock, unable to fight the dread anymore. Her chest seized; her shallow, sudden breath echoed through the room like a hiss.
“My God. She’s killed her.”
To be continued…